The graphic novel I translated a few years ago is in production, and coming out with Fantagraphics (swoon) next year. It’s an amazing work by the phenomenal Argentine author Héctor Germán Oesterheld, illustrated by the incredible Francisco Solano López. I’m so excited to see it brought out in English, I can barely contain myself. And for the most part, I’ve received some really great feedback on the translation and my advocacy for the work. But there’s this thing that has come up […]

Some smartening of some stuff I said about translation and poetry and compromised bodies at a poetry-gathering last week in LA made its way onto the Poetry Foundation blog. Amanda says these things way smarter than I think I did, though. “Here is what Erica Mena (of Anomalous) discussed in response to these questions (of course, this is just a summary, and many parts are missing): She wanted to contest the idea of translation as a the idea of equivalence—one […]

We have a new downstairs neighbor. Well, actually, we’re his new upstairs neighbors. Chester. Chester has lived in our building for almost twenty years. Chester is a cab driver in San Francisco, who is almost always at the lovely across the street bar for happy hour. Chester has excellent taste in classic jazz. How do I know that? Because our building used to be sort of a tenement, with all the cheap flimsy materials and thin walls and floors that […]

[Part 1 & Part 2 chronicle the unbelievable nightmare of moving with Fidelity Moving Group. Part 3 has some advice and things I wished I had thought of before moving.] We finally arrived, the day before what was supposed to be our delivery date, in San Francisco, exhausted, sun-burnt, stressed out, and at night. We knew that we should expect a strange, overstuffed couch sitting in our apartment, in addition to what we hoped was all of our own stuff. And there it […]

I don’t usually post calls for submissions on the blog, but this one is too exciting not to. Call for Critical Writing on the Gurlesque In the anthology Gurlesque: the new grrly, grostesque, burlesque poetics (Saturnalia, 2010),editors Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg gathered work from​ eighteen contemporary women poets who are “writing about and through femininity . . .brashly, playfully, provocatively, indulgently.” These poems have “unicorns inthem, and sequins, and swear words, and vomit.” Gurlesque alsoincludes eight visual artists […]

[Part 1 & Part 2 chronicle the unbelievable nightmare this move has been in more detail.] Though I’m still in the middle of the country, well, not exactly the middle anymore – now we’re in Arizona – and so the move has not finished because I still have to deal with getting a stranger’s couch out of my apartment when we arrive to San Francisco, I’ve been thinking a lot about this experience. The various other options we had. How […]

Oh, and actually that wasn’t the end of it.[Part one: pickup, and botched delivery before we arrived.] Today, June 9, I heard from my friend that the driver had contacted him (not me, not the manager or dispatcher) to get access back to our apartment. Because he had accidentally delivered someone else’s stuff as well as ours. I told my friend not to do anything, and that we would handle it, since I didn’t trust these people to figure out which stuff […]

Moving with Fidelity Moving Group The estimate was extremely low, almost unreasonably so, but Manisha seemed professional, and was very reassuring. The estimate was for 40 medium UHaul boxes, a 3-person couch, a queen sized mattress, a cedar chest, and a large piece of artwork, and was $1100 from Providence to San Francisco, including carrying up 2 large flights of stairs in San Francisco. The communication was bad from the beginning. Manisha told me that we would get a call […]

I’ve never really been afraid of the dark, which is odd because I’m an anxious person in general and the dark is a primal fear. I’m clinically phobic of spiders, and of heights, and it turns out thanks to a good friend one summer I was able to prioritize those fears. I am more afraid of spiders than of heights. We were on a bus day-trip into Albania, to see the spectacular ruins at Butrint, curving along narrow dirt roads. […]

Just re-read Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” thanks to a friend of mine reminding me how phenomenal it is. I’ve been thinking a lot about erotic energy recently. A few weeks ago a different friend gave me Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” to read, and it was revelatory. As I was reading it, I felt as though it was revealing me to myself. I don’t know that anything has ever made me feel so intensely engaged in all my […]